In common with half of YouTube, I was mesmerized by the BigDog videos from Boston Dynamics earlier in the year, though I couldn’t say much about how the robot worked. For everyone hungry for some more technical details, check out the talk by Marc Raibert at Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics 25 event. There’s some interesting discussion of the design of the system, where’s it’s headed, and more great video.

There are a bunch of other worthwhile talks from the event. I particularly enjoyed Hugh Durrant-Whyte’s description of building a fully automated container terminal “without a graduate student in 1000km”.